Deleted data? Don’t despair

A quick warning before I carry on: if your situation is dire, ie a crashed hard drive containing valuable data and you have no backup, think very carefully before attempting recovery yourself. If the value of the data warrants it, consider a professional recovery firm instead. Even switching on and running a failed hard drive reduces your chances of making a successful data recovery.

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FOR most file recovery tasks, the tool I turn to first is Piriform’s Recuva, which you can download from www.recuva.com. If you’re worried about your missing data, Recuva’s simple interface and clear “wizard” guidance does make a stressful situation easier. It also has a host of clever extras you can read about on the website, such as the ability to rebuild Microsoft Word files that you have forgotten to save or to securely delete files you never want retrieved.

To install Recuva, simply click the green download button on the Recuva website. This takes you to a page where you are encouraged to purchase a year’s worth of support for the Recuva “Professional” program by clicking “Buy Now” – however, you can download Recuva Free by clicking the “Download from Piriform.com” link to the left of the window.

Save the “rcsetup152.exe” file, and when it has downloaded, double-click it to start the installation. Accept the default settings for each step of the install process and, within a minute, the install completes. If prompted to install “CCleaner”, you can if you want to. It’s a safe and well-known system-cleaning tool also made by Piriform.

When you open Recuva, a “wizard” helps you restore deleted files in a few easy steps. This helps if your files are recently deleted and consist of ordinary documents, pictures or music. If you’re trying to recover corrupted or damaged data, cancel the wizard to launch advanced mode. Click the “Options” button, then click the “Actions” tab. Select “Scan for non-deleted files (for recovery from damaged or reformatted disks)”. Then click OK. Click “Scan” and Recuva will start scanning your computer for anything it can find – intact or not. “Deep Scan” is another option – use this if an ordinary scan fails to find your data. Deep scanning can take several hours.

When it has finished scanning, Recuva presents a list of files it has found, with an estimate of the likelihood of a successful recovery. Simply tick the files you want to recover, then click “Recover”. Choose a location to copy the recovered files to. If your hard drive is failing (hence the file recovery) you should save the recovered files to another hard drive or a USB drive.

Hopefully, you’ll never have to recover data. If one day you do, a tool like Recuva can rescue you… and I told you about it first!